[Infowarrior] - OT: What made America great is now killing her!

[Richard Forno]

Gord Long is a former senior group executive with IBM & Motorola, a principal in a high tech public start-up and founder of a private venture capital fund. His current essay on financial Creative Destruction, is rather thought provoking and includes lots of supporting/historical evidence.... I include the introduction and conclusions as a teaser for those interested.   -rick

What made America great is now killing her!  ("Creative Destruction is Secular not Cyclical")
http://home.comcast.net/~lcmgroupe/2010/Article-Innovation-Creative_Destruction.htm

What made America great was her unsurpassed ability to innovate.  Equally important was also her ability to rapidly adapt to the change that this innovation fostered. For decades the combination has been a self reinforcing growth dynamic with innovation offering a continuously improving standard of living and higher corporate productivity levels, which the US quickly embraced and adapted to.
 
This in turn financed further innovation. No country in the world could match the American culture that flourished on technology advancements in all areas of human endeavor. However, something serious and major has changed across America.  Daily, more and more are becoming acutely aware of this, but few grasp exactly what it is.  It is called Creative Destruction. 
 
It turns out that what made America great is now killing her!'

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A STARTING POINT FOR CHANGE – Gordon’s Top Ten

As I said in the beginning the US needs a bold new “Marshall” plan to fight the new destruction of creative destruction. Here is a starting point for public debate:

1 – If we can spend $165B bailing out AIG, then we can spend $100B (4 years of college @ 50K/year X 500,000 students) and guarantee everyone in America a college education to compete in the 21st century. Parents will start to spend immediately instead of presently being almost financially paralyzed with skyrocketing education costs.

2- Obama says we need to be leaders in Energy. OK. Where are the programs? Where are the 50,000 new university teaching and research positions ( 50,000 X 75K = $3.8B)? At $3.8B this is a rounding error compared to the banks TARP program.

3- 99% of all jobs in America are created by small business with less than 500 employees. Stop treating them like they are last on the ‘to help’ list after the banks, financial institutions and S&P 500 but first on the taxation list. S&P 500 paid almost net zero taxes, reduced US hiring, yet received the bulk of the governments bailouts. Small business is the golden goose that every administration seems determine to cook. What has the government done for small business other than burden them with Obamacare and the potential removal of the Bush tax cuts (most small business are directly affected proprietorships)? If you can’t immediately recite what the government has done to help small business as THE US employer (versus what they have done for the bank and financial lobby), then you understand the problem.

4- The number of Government employees, in addition to their salaries and benefits (federal, state & local) can best be described as out of control. According to a new study from the Heritage Foundation, U.S. government workers earn 30 to 40 percent more money than their private sector counterparts on average. So, in essence, the ‘servants’ make substantially more money than the taxpayers who employ them. Isn’t the system great? In fact, according to the study, if you add in retirement and health care benefits, the average federal employee now earns nearly twice as much as the average private sector employee.

5- Make Social Security and Medicare financially sound so Americas can believe and budget that it will be there for them. The public will spend and invest if they know they have a nest egg that really exists. The government is fooling no one. Kids learn that Social Security and Medicare is unfunded before their college freshman year today.

The stark reality of the shift from defined benefits to contributory benefits over the last decade is just now sinking in with the US consumer. They now have no retirement like their parents had. Retirement savings is something when added to college costs is leaving them frightened. Worried people don't spend money and when the economy is 70% consumer spending you have an economic crisis.  Political denial and the government attempting to paper it over with policies of extend and pretend are misplaced and will make the inevitability even more difficult to effectively address.

6- When did the American people decide to fund military operations in over 130 countries around the world? With 40.8M people on food stamps, something is seriously out of balance here but there is no public debate thought to be required by either party.

7- The US has no full scale strategic growth programs being initiated by the present administration. We have only financial stimulus or austerity programs. There is a big difference that seems wasted on Washington.

8- Washington and the lobbyists that control it have taken control of our government. Obama campaigned to  stop earmarks which ranged in the area of approximately 10,000 annually prior to his presidency. In his first year they increased to the 11,000 range. This is not the change he promised as more pork increasingly flows.

9- For those that actually read it, Obamacare is not a solution for healthcare. It is a stealth income tax we will all soon get hit with. The Dodd-Frank Act is not a fix to what caused the 2008 financial crisis but rather is the most dramatic shift in centralized US government planning and control since the 1930’s. Both these bills were over 2000 pages compared to landmark bills historically being 25 – 45 pages. Indications are that few of our elected representatives actually read either of these documents. They simply voted party lines. As Sarbanes-Oxley dictates, CEOs must sign their corporate 10-Q reports to the government and are liable for it. It is a felony not to. Every elected official should also sign that he or she has personally read the entire act prior to being allowed to vote on it or it likewise will be a felony.

10- The Supreme Court recently over-turned major elements of the Campaign Contribution Reform bill. Washington and the media have now gone completely mute on this subject as politicians scramble for mid-term campaign money for media expense coverage. Maybe our elected officials should vote with the same urgency on this matter as they are presently on giving billions of ‘candy’ away almost daily to every financial disruption, state budget problem, unemployment benefit problem or sign of increasing housing default and foreclosure rates during this run up to the fall elections.

I could go on, but I think you get the message. America is afraid to be bold! We have no strategy, no plan, no funding and no leadership! In my days as a VP of Engineering you were fired for just one of these shortfalls.